Thousands of years ago, ancient hunters described their exploits to each other with figures on the walls of the caves of Lascaux. Today, teachers of every type instruct students by drawing on blackboards; engineers draw diagrams on paper to describe their ideas to colleagues; executives explain with charts and graphs the performance of corporations, new plans and projections for growth. Even lawyers have come to rely on diagrams in the courtroom to explain difficult facts and to augment their advocacy skills. An image is a most effective mode of communicating ideas to an audience; and, when combined with speech, it delivers information with the greatest likelihood that the audience will understand and remember it. A picture is truly worth a thousand words.
Getting pictures in front of an audience, and presenting them in a meaningful fashion, can cost thousands of dollars and thousands of hours. The step of preparing individual images for a visual presentation has progressed from drawing on cave walls to computer programs that generate graphics from raw data to computer aided design. However, the step of presenting those images in sequence to an audience is still rather primitive: frequently it is done by reducing the images to a transparency or slide for overhead projection, or to a piece of card board. The presenter, or some assistant, must then physically move these "hard" copies. A presentation is, thus, often clumsy and difficult to handle, especially when there are a large number of pictures, graphs and charts.
Very recently, however, visual presentations have begun to move into the electronic age with displays of electronically stored images. Images or "screens" are first authored electronically, by a program on a personal computer, and then stored in a digital format in an optical, electronic or magnetic storage device. The order of images is also set, and any desired "transition" effects between images are added to link the images.
In addition to the already difficult task of giving a visual presentation, coordinating a presentation using electronically stored images has introduced a host of new problems associated with using the equipment.
A presenter must operate a personal computer during a presentation. Using previously existing wireless, remote keyboards for the personal computer, the presenter could move away from the computer during presentation. However, these wireless remote keyboards are just that: keyboards. A presenter must still operate the personal computer.
Also a presenter must be able to control, in addition to the personal computer, devices that display the images and the devices that store and play back the images. Take for example, a presenter who wants to integrate a "video clip" into the presentation. The video clip is stored on tape and played back on a VCR through a television set, or from an optical disk through a personal computer to a CRT or LCD device. The presenter then needs to control the colors, contrast or sound level on the display device, in addition to the starting and stopping, slow motion or other "built-in" features on the playback/storage device.
Where an audience's immediate response to the presentation is measured, such as in a test marketing situation, or where individual members are "quizzed", such as in a classroom, control is further complicated by the need for a response system integrated into the electronic presentation system and controllable by a presenter.
An electronic presentation system must further be adaptable and be able to accommodate various kinds of personal computers, program presentation managers and display equipment, as the presenter needs to have the ability to use the equipment that is available.
The presentation itself must be easily tailored or edited, even during the presentation, for the particular audience or to accommodate changes to the presentation introduced by the presenter. No one can predict how a presentation to, for example, the board of directors or to a classroom will proceed. Certain images will need to be repeated, others skipped, and perhaps even the order of the images rearranged. The presenter must be able to do more than simply command the presentation management program to proceed to the next screen. Further, presentation effects such as pointers, magnifiers and relevators, which emphasize important points, should be readily manipulatable during a presentation.
Finally, all of these capabilities must be made available to the finger tips of the presenter in an uncomplicated manner.